"Life Without Principle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Thoreau Henry David)

passing through Chancery, has settled somewhere else, there to
become once more a patron of the arts.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead
downward. To have done anything by which you earned money merely is to
have been truly idle or worse. If the laborer gets no more than the
wages which his employer pays him, he is cheated, he cheats himself.
If you would get money as a writer or lecturer, you must be popular,
which is to go down perpendicularly. Those services which the
community will most readily pay for, it is most disagreeable to
render. You are paid for being something less than a man. The State
does not commonly reward a genius any more wisely. Even the poet
laureate would rather not have to celebrate the accidents of
royalty. He must be bribed with a pipe of wine; and perhaps another
poet is called away from his muse to gauge that very pipe. As for my
own business, even that kind of surveying which I could do with most
satisfaction my employers do not want. They would prefer that I should
do my work coarsely and not too well, ay, not well enough. When I
observe that there are different ways of surveying, my employer
commonly asks which will give him the most land, not which is most
correct. I once invented a rule for measuring cord-wood, and tried
to introduce it in Boston; but the measurer there told me that the
sellers did not wish to have their wood measured correctly- that he
was already too accurate for them, and therefore they commonly got
their wood measured in Charlestown before crossing the bridge.

The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a
good job," but to perform well a certain work; and, even in a
pecuniary sense, it would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so
well that they would not feel that they were working for low ends,
as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do
not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for
love of it.

It is remarkable that there are few men so well employed, so much to
their minds, but that a little money or fame would commonly buy them
off from their present pursuit. I see advertisements for active young
men, as if activity were the whole of a young man's capital. Yet I
have been surprised when one has with confidence proposed to me, a
grown man, to embark in some enterprise of his, as if I had absolutely
nothing to do, my life having been a complete failure hitherto. What a
doubtful compliment this to pay me! As if he had met me half-way
across the ocean beating up against the wind, but bound nowhere, and
proposed to me to go along with him! If I did, what do you think the
underwriters would say? No, no! I am not without employment at this
stage of the voyage. To tell the truth, I saw an advertisement for
able-bodied seamen, when I was a boy, sauntering in my native port,
and as soon as I came of age I embarked.

The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise